Can I guess how old you are?

“Without using numbers, how old are you?”

Radio host Eric Alper posted this on Twitter the other day, and I paused. The answers were interesting. Someone said “Sesame Street” had been interrupted by the Challenger explosion. Many tossed down the top song the day they were born. Someone said their birthday was the day Anne Frank and her family were found and arrested. It’s a great question.

How old am I, without revealing numbers? I wore my winter boots over my shoes — and snow piled in every time. We’d never heard of sunscreen. Going on an airplane was a huge deal that we did once; my grandfather refused because he thought if he walked around, the plane would tip. My mom was pregnant with me when Kennedy was assassinated.

Men still came out to pump your gas after you ran across a hose that sounded a bell inside. On the side of the pump were two little balls that spun madly in their bubble. The year I started high school was when that gas changed to unleaded.

We shopped for groceries at Steinberg’s, where I was fascinated by the white milk jugs that were looped around a tall pole by their red handle when you returned them. We often walked there, because we had one car and Dad worked. Big shopping was for when Dad was on night shift. My mom had a roller set and my dad had a crew cut.

My friends and I listened to Top 40 songs on CKOC. We’d desperately try to tape our favourite songs on a cassette player, always missing the opening notes. In high school, the coolest kids had an 8-track in their car, and huge speakers on the back seat. In high school, I did my Sassoon jeans up with plyers, experimented with something called Lee Press On Nails, discovered the Bay City Rollers and Earth shoes. I don’t recommend any of these things.

My kindergarten teacher wore a little rabbit jacket I thought was perfection. My roller skates had a key. We sang O Canada and recited the Lord’s Prayer every morning at school. Sometimes we’d mix it up with “God Save the Queen.” Teachers could — and did — hit you with a ruler. I was a teenager when the library started using microfiches to store information.

Nobody filmed the plays and concerts at school; instead, they just enjoyed it. Nobody left after their kid performed, because they knew it wasn’t just all about their kid. People would take a picture or two with their 110 cameras, then do it again when the flash bulb burned out after it had gone off four times — if you were lucky. Getting those pictures developed was terribly expensive, so my childhood photos are whatever my mother could manage in one shot: many cut off heads, two little girls in the corner of the picture, sometimes people we didn’t know walking by. When I hit high school, Polaroid cameras were big. I still have some blank squares, long faded into obscurity.

I could earn a dollar for washing the station wagon, but only if I did the windows properly. We’d go to the variety store and didn’t have to lock our bikes up. The owner wouldn’t charge us the deposit on the little Coke bottles if we stood outside and drank them, and brought them right back in. My mother had potato chips delivered to the house, and kept the Chip King tin way up on top of the cabinet. When she went out, we’d grab a chair and get them down, then feign ignorance.

How old are you, without using numbers?